The Submate Semi-Marathon

This is an update on Submate from Startup Weekend Paris by Laurent Kretz

The semi-marathon of Paris happened yesterday – congrats to all finalists, especially for running by 0 degrees!!

This post is not about this run, but the SubMate semi-marathon instead. It’s Monday March 8, and we’re finally catching sight of the finish line. A semi-marathon, because it’s an early alpha we’ll be releasing. But as Reid Hoffman said: “If you are not ashamed by your product when you launch it, you launched too late” !
So here’s how it went down so far on SubMate:

End of December. We meet a cool guy, Hubert Fisselier, a soon to be iPhone developer. He loves the concept of SubMate, and we decide to work together on an iPhone app.

Mid-January. Things are slow in December and early January, you know how it is: Xmas, foie gras, Hanukkah, vacations, family, … So nothing happens until mid-January when we pick where we left off. Starting out by rethinking the site, the architecture, the navigation.

End of January. We are trying to code as much as possible, but my two cofounders are employed. Good news: Sylvain has decided to leave his company to concentrate full time on the project. And Jonathan is working on nights and weekends.

February. On the 12th, almost a month ago, Sylvain hits his final day at his company. February is a tricky month though: it flies by so fast! Without even noticing it, we’re already at the end of the month. However, since the 12th, Sylvain and myself work efficiently on the code. The majority of the development happens as of that date.

End of February. We applied for a couple of conferences, and are selected amongst the 20 finalists of Plugg 2010. We decide to target the conference (March 11th) for the beta release of the app. The first release of the iPhone app is looking good, and we need to finalize it and put some polish on it.

March. Here we are. Less than 3 months since the Startup Weekend, and a month into heavy coding. The beta should be ready soon, and the iPhone app looks better every day.

As you can see, it’s been a marathon so far. In only three months, we went from an idea to an organized startup project. And in only a month, we took a dirty prototype to a beta site and an iPhone app.
But I call it a “semi” because what’s coming next is HUGE. So stay tuned for some cool SubMate news!